The print is meant to celebrate the upcoming exhibition on Bowie, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. You can pre-order it here.

"The rationale behind it comes from my first association of David Bowie, the 1986 film Labyrinth. Initially I was going to set his name in the same typographic style as the lettering on the film posters … but where’s the fun/challenge in that? Instead I’ve created bespoke lettering and made his name into a labyrinth." --Harry Heptonstall

"It’s a hand-drawn piece. My mum used to live around the same area as Bowie in Beckenham, Kent, and her sister and friend used to babysit for him years ago. This is loosely connected to the fact that she gave me loads of art pens and markers when I was younger, one of which (a Paper Mate chisel tip I believe) I used to draw this." --Rich Lyons

"Mine is quite personal. It is a modern interpretation of a graphic I painted on my school satchel in '73. I did it with silver Airx paint and it sat very well next to my MUFC Rule OK (in red, black, and white) design. Manchester and Bowie always did go well together. My daughter is well chued, she is so looking forward to the exhibition, as am I." --David Jones

"In early '76 Bowie released Station to Station. At the same time I was being 'allocated’ to my new family, being transferred from station to station so to speak. The typographic treatment is based on displaced shapes and repetition centered around a symbol of movement. There is also a nod to the wall that Bowie is looking through on the cover of the single." --Marcus Piper

"While working on Lodger and the 'Boys Keep Swinging’ track, Bowie wanted to get a rougher garage sound, so he asked the band to swap instruments. Guitarist Carlos Alomar played drums and the drummer Dennis Davis played bass. The final results had a post-punk feel … so I made the E into a W, the W into an E. B is made from the I and cut-up O and the I and O characters are made from the letter B" --Gareth Wild

I had a waking dream of a David Bowie totem, a mysterious ancient thing that arrived from another planet. (As a way of explaining it through a reference, the opening act of 2001 comes to mind.) The totem represented a timeless reminder of Bowie’s legend. The carving is how I imagined Bowie’s name would appear on the totem; the dark surrounding print is suggestive of the totem’s shape." --James Nelson

"Attached is my chosen type treatment, inspired by my favorite Bowie cover, Aladdin Sane (art directed by my friend’s mother-in-law, Celia Philo--true story). I was going to do that thing where you have imagery showing through the letterforms … but maybe that’s too fancypants." --Gavin Lucas

"My reason for creating this would be very simple. I found a Bowie signature, it’s quite stylized like a logo almost. I just wanted to enclose it and put the words 'Made In Great Brixton’ underneath in Gill Sans so it looks kind of like a clothing label from the Festival of Britain." --Martyn Atkins

"I typed the word 'Bowie’ on my Olivetti Lettera 32. I imagine many of the great man’s lyrics would have been typed on a typewriter at some stage …" --Paul Belford

"Jonathan [Barnbrook]’s initial response to this brief was he was busy but he would try to fit it in. It wasn’t until early January when Bowie’s latest album The Next Day came out and subsequently we then discoverd he had also been working on the graphics for the V&A exhibition that we realised it was working on two other Bowie projects that had held him back working on this."

"On the release date of Bowie’s The Next Day, Trevor Jackson commented on Facebook showing his appreciation, ‘Genius sleeve, the best album cover I’ve seen for a very long time.' Also by pushing our deadline to the limit on this brief and being the last submission to arrive means this logo’s inspiration has brought this project up to date and to a fitting conclusion."

101 Typographic Tributes To David Bowie, Collected On One Glamorous Poster

For an upcoming exhibition, 101 artists contributed their own identities for the inimitable musician.

Before the wedding dress and the pointy cone bra and the Kabbalah tattoos, at a point when Madonna was a star only of the New York City club scene and still establishing her first public persona, David Bowie had already cycled through enough different looks to fill a coffee table book. What Gaga has distilled down to a science, Bowie approached as art form unto itself, morphing from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke and exploring countless other styles in between and beyond.

It’s fitting, then, that U.K. creative type Mark Blamire didn’t try to limit himself to a single vision for his contribution to David Bowie Is, an upcoming exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London. For his limited-edition piece, printed on appropriately glamorous holographic rainbow paper, Blamire enlisted 101 different artists to contribute their own typographic identities for the musician—and then compiled them into a single, beautifully discordant graphic.

The main idea, Blamire says, was to represent Bowie’s "chameleon-like persona" through typography. And at that it clearly succeeds. In some cases, designers made use of their favorite typefaces, where others styled the artist’s name by hand. Some treatments are fairly straightforward nods to the Duke’s album covers, others include more subtle allusions. And while all of the contributions are about Bowie, some reflect the impact he had on the contributing artists themselves.

Marcus Piper explains that his geometric treatment, "based on displaced shapes and repetition centered around a symbol of movement," was inspired by his experience with Bowie’s 1976 album Station to Station, which was released at a point when Piper was transitioning to a new family, or "being transferred from station to station so to speak." David Jones explains that his is a modern update of a graphic he inked on his backpack as a schoolkid in 1973.

Blamire says he "really didn’t struggle to get people to contribute," and out of a hundred submissions, only two ended up using the same typeface, which is proof of just how phenomenally broad his career has been, visually speaking (thankfully, Blamire was able to include both of the submissions: one was in all capitals, the other all lowercase). And while it’s not like musicians and visual artists are strange bedfellows by any means, Blamire thinks, in this case, the kinship is a special one.

"I think designers like to try and tear up the rule book or reinvent the wheel somehow when they approach a new project, and Bowie’s philosophy totally represents that idea," he explains. "[Bowie] evokes this spirit of throwing away and discarding old ideas and always reaching forward at keeping ahead of the curve creatively. He constantly moves forward, never looking backward … and it’s this pioneering spirit of Bowie that means he always remains credible and never out of fashion."